


Shifting Constellations

by FictionPenned



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Alex asked why we even have this lever, Drabble Collection, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-16
Updated: 2020-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:47:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23176450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FictionPenned/pseuds/FictionPenned
Summary: On this particular night, she stands in the middle of a small field outside of a dinky hotel that time forgot. Her hands shelter in her pockets and her eyes remain fixed on the constellations that sprawl across the night sky. Thanks to her father, she can name most of them. “If you’re lost, the stars will always point you home,” he used to tell her over a star chart and a telescope. Home was a tricky thing back then. They moved so often that she never really latched onto a single place, but her family always made an effort to make the endless parade of houses feel comfortable and familiar. Her father and her sister held her heart close, and in their absence, it shattered into a million pieces.A drabble collection in response to the prompt five times + stars.
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Comments: 1
Kudos: 16





	Shifting Constellations

I.

For the first time in months, Scully is late to work. 

Amusement curls the corners of Mulder’s lips as he leans back in his chair with smug satisfaction, swinging his feet onto the cluttered surface of the desk. He checks his watch on final time before lacing his hands behind his head. Under different circumstances, he might have been worried about her, but he had been on the receiving end of a surprisingly slurred phone call in the uninhabitable hours of the morning, and he has a sneaking suspicion that she is coping with both a hangover and some personal shame. 

That’s fine. He can wait. 

By the time the door eases open, a constellation of number two pencils dot the ceiling, marking every ninety seconds of boredom. 

“Morning, Scully,” he says with a grin, sweeping a small mountain of wooden pencil shavings off of the surface of his desk and into the trash can, hiding the evidence. Given the pained wrinkles around her eyes and the tired scowl sunk into the corners of her mouth, he doubts that she would notice, but he still feels compelled to put his best foot forward. He may not be the neatest human being, but he has been putting more effort into being functional. He’s been sleeping in his bedroom and everything. Granted, he’s not sure how the bedroom got clean or where the waterbed came from, but it has drastically improved his quality of life. “Alarm clock out of commission?”

An unenthusiastic hum buzzes past her lips. “I, um, had a rough night.” The base of her palm rubs her eye, attempting to chase away the throbbing pain that lurks in her sinuses and behind her temples. It does not help. With a sigh so strong it could move mountains, she collapses into her chair, a mess of uncooperative limbs and sheer exhaustion. “Please tell me we’re not packing our bags and chasing down some shape-shifting Bigfoot in Arkansas or something.”

He leans forward, clasping his hands in front of him, eyes and voice alight with teasing mischief. “Shape-shifting Bigfoot? You know something that I don’t know, Scully?” 

“I sure hope not,” she grumbles, words barely audible. 

She props an elbow on the arm of the chair and buries her face in her palm. As she turns her head, a glimmer of gold catches the light and his attention. 

Without thinking, Mulder stands. “You, uh, you’ve got something right there. Mind if I get it?” he asks, circling the desk and waiting for permission before satiating his idle curiosity. 

“I don’t care.” Scully doesn’t have the energy to care about much of anything. Her hangover has beaten her into weary submission. She barely feels like a part of the world; it just rotates around her. She feels so absent, in fact, that she took a cab into work instead of getting behind the wheel of her car. That’s part of the reason why she was so late.   
  
Gently, Mulder detangles the foreign object from her hair. A gold confetti star stares up at him from his open palm. “You hit up a party last night, Scully?” 

“What?” she rouses slightly, looking up at him with obvious confusion. 

He holds up the star as an explanation. 

“Yeah, um, it was a friend’s birthday. She went a little wild.” There’s a pause as she runs through her vague recollections of the night in order to sort out the information that she is willing to share with him from that which she isn’t. “Do you ever realize that you’ve suddenly gotten old, Mulder? Like time’s worn on and life’s moved forward and you’ve somehow been left behind?” 

“You calling me old?”

Her head tilts, knowing gaze calling him on his deliberate misunderstanding. “You know what I mean.”

He circles back around the desk and takes up position in his chair once again, eyes raking the pencil-flecked ceiling as he considers how best to frame his thoughts in order to provide maximum payoff. “I don’t know. Felt pretty young when I woke up to a drunk coworker berating me over the phone, but you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

The look on her face is priceless. 

  
  
  


II

Her elbow presses into his side as her head lolls against his shoulder. 

Stakeouts are no agent’s favorite duty. They mean long hours spent in hot cars and in close proximity, sipping iced tea that’s gone warm and coffee that’s gone cold. Scully may drool, but at least she smells nice. Mulder has been in far less comfortable positions with far less tolerable people. Once, he had been forced to sit shoulder to shoulder with an agent who insisted on eating sardines straight out of the can while on duty. It had taken hours for the smell to dissipate, and even longer for the sight of it to fade from where it had been seared into the backs of his retinas. 

Time ticks on, and Mulder keeps his eyes mostly trained on the abandoned building across the street, though he very occasionally allows his gaze to wander back to his partner, just to make sure she’s still breathing. It seems unlikely that she would die unceremoniously in the passenger seat of a rented car, but their collective luck has never been particularly good. He’s lost count of family members that have passed on, personal brushes with near-death, and the number of cases that they have failed to resolve along the way. 

No matter how hard they work, the universe always seems to be a step ahead of them. 

She shifts against him, and he glances down at her before checking his watch. Five minutes to midnight. Almost shift change. 

Gently, he sweeps her hair back, exposing a bit of skin by her temple where a cluster of freckles mark out a haphazard star. He taps it once. 

“Hey.”   
  
It takes Scully a moment to pull herself into wakefulness and wrestle her tongue into coherent speech. “What?”

“You drooled on me again.” A hint of a smile bites the corners of his lips. It’s a familiar exchange, about something that is no longer a bother nor an embarrassment.    
  
Scully stretches, shaking her head and sending red hair cascading back over the freckled star. “Sorry.”

The apology, too, is cursory. She doesn’t have to mean it anymore. Doesn’t even have to give it if she doesn’t want to. Increasing degrees of comfort and little, friendly nudges against professional boundaries are just part of the way things are between them, and she doesn’t mind. 

Mulder doesn’t mind either.

  
  
  


III

“I got you something,” Scully says, reaching across the cluttered desk to set a small box in front of her partner. Though she and Mulder have exchanged gifts before, they do not exchange gifts often. They often overlook birthdays and holidays, but there are scattered days in the space between when they belatedly pass on some small token of affection or another. It is mostly incidental generosity, but small comforts mean a great deal when one faces down the unknown with ceaseless regularity.    
  
Mulder glances up, eyes alight with joy and fondness. “It’s not my birthday.”   
  
“I know.” Scully crosses her arms and sinks into her chair. “I saw it in the bookstore at Georgetown and I thought of you. Plus, the last time I bought you a birthday present, I forgot about it for months, so…” The thought trails off unfinished, and she tilts her head in the direction of the box, red hair whispering across the top of her shoulders. “Go ahead. Open it.”

Mulder picks up the package and leans back in his chair, gently removing the lid. On a bed of white tissue paper, sits a gold lapel pin. A cluster of stars sits above a circular pendant that reads, “When It’s Darkest, Men See Stars.”    


“College kids and their poets, eh Scully?” he says, lips lifting into a small smile. “Thank you. I’ll wear it close, and keep it in mind the next time I miss your birthday.”

“You’re very welcome, Mulder.”

  
  


IV

Stars dangle from the rearview mirror of the rental, jostling and jangling as they traverse pitted roads that haven’t seen a proper maintenance crew in years. It is an unusual feature for a rental car, but the car is similarly strange. Rather than the typical 4-door fare, the rental car shop provided them with a beat-up pick-up truck that had likely seen more than one previous owner. The back bumper is covered with the sticky memory of bumper stickers that fell off in long-forgotten rainstorms, the faint smell of cigarettes stubbornly clings to the interior, and the only thing that speaks to its current status is a small sticker on the inside of the windshield and a keychain that bumps against the wheel every time they hit a bump.    
  
“I can’t believe this is what they gave you,” Scully says, bracing herself against the armrest as they skirt another pothole.    
  
“You get what you get in these small towns, Scully.” Mulder does not share her concern, and a mischievous grin splits his face as he adds, “I always wanted one of these.”   
  
Stars clang and their knees crash together as they hit a pothole head on.    
  
When she manages to catch her breath again, Scully is armed with a dry comment. “Not for the suspension, surely.”   
  
He takes the next turn a little more carefully. “Teenage boys don’t worry about suspension. They worry about making out with girls in the bed of the truck in the middle of nowhere and looking up at the stars.”    
  
“Sounds like the beginning of a cold case.”    
  
“Or a romance novel. It all depends on your perspective.” He lifts a single shoulder in the ghost of a shrug. “Not that it matters. They’re a terror to park in city streets. My mother talked me out of it.” 

He pauses to inhale, shooting a daring glance towards the passenger seat. “Wouldn’t mind living out those dreams of cuddling under the stars, though.”    
  
Red eyebrows lift. “In this thing? You’d need a tetanus booster first.”   
  
“If you see a hospital, I’m more than willing to pull over for a quick pitstop.”   
  
Their shared laughter mixes and mingles in the cockpit, bright as the collection of stars on the rearview mirror and lined with the faint memory of smoke. 

  
  


V   
  
Grief worsens on its anniversaries, and those anniversaries have multiplied more quickly than Scully would have ever anticipated. Time and circumstances keep robbing her of the people she loves, stealing them away to some great unknown. If there were less of these sad days, she would be able to observe them in private, but alas, they come in such abundance that she is often forced to soldier her way through an investigation -- stuck in some unknown state with only the stars to look upon and remember.    
  
On this particular night, she stands in the middle of a small field outside of a dinky hotel that time forgot. Her hands shelter in her pockets and her eyes remain fixed on the constellations that sprawl across the night sky. Thanks to her father, she can name most of them. “If you’re lost, the stars will always point you home,” he used to tell her over a star chart and a telescope. Home was a tricky thing back then. They moved so often that she never really latched onto a single place, but her family always made an effort to make the endless parade of houses feel comfortable and familiar. Her father and her sister held her heart close, and in their absence, it shattered into a million pieces.    
  
Tears gather in corners of her eyes, made icy by the press of the night air, and she blinks them away. On this day more than any other, she misses her father.

Footsteps crunch the grass behind her, and she does not have to turn around to know that Mulder’s joined her.    
  
“You once spoke to me about how the light from long dead stars still travels to us, passing through space and time, how that light is always moving, never dying, even though the stars that spawned it died long ago.”   
  
“Souls enduring ad infinitum,” Mulder finishes the thought for her, brushing up against her shoulder with his arm. “You okay, Scully?”   
  
Bright blue eyes remain fixed on the sky. “I will be. Eventually.”    
  
Mulder nods, and does not press the issue.    
  
He believes her. He always believes her. 


End file.
